Empires Of The Word Part 12

yadcchya copapannam svargadvaram apavtam

sukhina katriya partha labhante yuddham idrsam.

atha cet tvam ima dharmya sangrama na kariyasi

tata svadharmam kirtim ca hitva papam avapsyasi.

akirtim capi bhutani kathayiyanti te' vyayam

sambhavitasya cakirtir maraad atiricyate.

Looking to your own duty too, you must not flinch;

for there is nothing better for a Kshatriya than a righteous fight.

Blest are the Kshatriyas who gain such a fight,

offered unsought, O Partha, as an open door to heaven.

But if you choose not to carry on this righteous conflict,

then discarding personal duty and glory, you will fall into sin.

Beings will tell of your eternal dishonour

and, for a respectable man, dishonour is worse than death.

Bhagavad Gita, ii.31-4.

Being a Hindu G.o.d, Krishna does go on to ground this exposition of the heroic code within a theology of reincarnation and a theory of knowledge that reduces the world of action to a shadow-play of appearances; but the basic ethic of n.o.bility expressed through courage and military prowess is clear.

It is usually presumed that it was this att.i.tude to life, together with the dominating technologies of warhorses, wheeled vehicles and metal weapons, which spread Aryan lords.h.i.+p and language across northern India, and then kept the various kingdoms in an almost constant roil of mutual warfare over this period. (This model of language spread is, after all, well attested in many parts of the world in the historical period, as when the Normans brought Norman French to England, or the conquistadores brought Spanish to Central and South America.) But besides the battles recounted in Sanskrit epics there is very little evidence, from archaeology, inscriptions or indeed from indigenous tradition, that the language was spread with fire and sword. Particularly in India, there is an ingrained belief that Hinduism and Sanskrit are not the result of alien invasions, but developed rather wholly within the subcontinent. There has even been a recent attempt to give this story a full quasi-mythological backing, developing the theory that, if there are linguistic and genetic links with the rest of the Indo-European language family, this is due to the spread of the Aryans round Europe before their return to their true home of India.23 Whatever the truth of the Aryans' prehistoric wanderings, there is a lot that shows that horses were important to them from the beginning. In the Hitt.i.te libraries of central Anatolia (2500 miles to the west of the Indus) we find a manual on horsemans.h.i.+p and chariotry, written by Kikkuli the Mitannian in the mid-second millennium BC: he gives his profession as a.s.sussanni-, which can be equated with the Vedic Sanskrit asvasani 'gaining or procuring horses', and his text is full of loan words which are evidently Indo-Aryan: courses can be aikawartanna, terawartanna, panzawartanna, sattawartanna, nawartanna, '1-, 3-, 5-, 7- or 9-turns', which is just Sanskrit eka-, tri-, panca-, sapta- and nava-vartana. Most Mitannians spoke a completely unrelated language, Hurrian, but in another text written in this language at much the same time (from the city of Nuzi-Yorgan Tepe-in northern Iraq) horse colours are given in something close to Sanskrit: babru (babhru), 'chestnut', parita (palita), 'grey', pinkara (pingala), 'roan'.

Here the Aryan elite culture of the horseman had been superimposed on a populace that spoke another language. The evidence stems from long before and far away; but the situation of the early days of Aryan language in India was probably very similar. This can be seen even within the structure of Sanskrit itself.

Sanskrit and its related Indo-Aryan languages are different from all their relatives to the north and west, in Iran, Russia and Europe, in possessing an extra series of consonants, known to Sanskrit grammarians as the murdhanya ('in the head') sounds, or to Westerners as the retroflex stops, after the position of the tongue: , , h, h and with the tongue curled backward against the roof of the mouth, as against t, d, th, dh and n, where the tongue touches the back of the front teeth. So paati, 'splits', is a different word from patati, 'falls', and maa, 'foam, cream', from manda, 'dull'. These sounds are also characteristic of the Dravidian languages now spoken to the south of the Aryan languages in India, as well as other neighbours, such as the Munda languages dotted around the north-east of India. Whereas no other Indo-European language has them (making them unlikely as a feature of whatever language they all originate from), they are so systematic in Dravidian that they are probably as old as the family. It would appear, then, that they have established themselves in Sanskrit and Aryan as a 'substrate', a residual feature of the languages that the earliest adopters of Sanskrit were speaking, and could not lose when they learned the new language.

There is also some cultural evidence in the Rig Veda which suggests how the invading Aryans felt they differed from the peoples, the dasa and dasyu,* their language came to dominate, for they saw them as having darker skins, 'of black origin', kayoni.24 This fits with the Sanskrit word used traditionally for the four-fold division into social castes, Brahman~Kshatriya~Vaisya~udra, namely vaa, 'colour'. The dasyu are represented in the epic Mahabharata by the two younger sons of Pandu ('the Pale'), Nakula and Sahadeva, born to his second wife Madri, who is said to be black eyed and dusky complexioned. Throughout the epic, they act as faithful, but unimaginative, supporters of their apparently n.o.bler Aryan elder half-brothers, Yuddhishthira ('Firm in Fight'), Bhima ('terrible') and Arjuna ('Resplendent').

We have seen that the process of a.s.similation with various local groups continued well into the second millennium AD, and seems to have involved a kaleidoscopic succession of languages in some parts of north and central India. One of the most memorable moments, at least politically, in this long series of s.h.i.+fting patterns occurred about 260 BC, when Asoka conquered the eastern kingdom of Kalinga (approximately the area of modern Orissa). This conquest was a high-water mark for imperial unity in India, one not to be exceeded for two thousand years. Asoka wrote this of the experience all over the rest of his empire (in Magadhi, Aramaic and Greek): 'In the eighth year of his reign, Piyadasi conquered Kalinga. 150,000 people were captured there and deported, 100,000 others were killed and almost as many perished. Since that time, pity and compa.s.sion gripped him, and he was overwhelmed by that...'

This compa.s.sion put an end to his wars of conquest, and made him turn instead to the propagation of dhamma (Sanskrit dharma), variously translated as 'virtue', 'duty' or 'the Law'. It is said that he stood on the hill at Dhauli, and saw the Daya river flow red with blood. Writing specifically to the Kalinga population on a rock inscription at that spot, he says, instead of recounting the campaign: 'All men are my children. Just as, in regard to my own children, I desire that they may be provided with all kinds of welfare and happiness in this world and in the next, the same I desire also in regard to all men. But you do not understand how far my intention goes in this respect. A few among you perchance understand it but even such of you understand it partly and not fully...'

In fact, it remains obscure what, if any, linguistic effect Asoka's conquest had on Kalinga. It is just too long ago, and too much has happened since.

Orissa is now a mainly Aryan-speaking area (with a strong sprinkling of unrelated adivasi, i.e. 'aboriginal', languages): the earliest inscriptions in its language date from the tenth century AD. The language is Oriya, closely related to the Bengali spoken farther north; but little is known of its earlier history, and it has been suggested that Orissa was still non-Aryan even in the seventh century AD.25 Xuan-Zang recognised at least three distinct countries in this region: Ura (the origin of the name Orissa), which he said had 'words and language different from Central India', Konyodha, 'with the same written characters as those of mid-India, but language and mode of p.r.o.nunciation quite different', and Kalinga, where 'the language is light and tripping, and their p.r.o.nunciation is distinct and correct. But in both particulars, that is, as to words and sounds, they are very different from mid-India.'26 This kind of evidence is just one example of what makes it so difficult to depict in any detail the language map of India in past centuries.

Sanskrit influence permeated farther south, with the cultural spread of Hinduism, eventually saturating with borrowed words three of the major non-Aryan languages, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Tamil, in the extreme south-east, was less affected linguistically, although its society was ultimately no less Hindu. And besides this gradual export of words, there had also been, in the middle of the first millennium BC, a major transplant of a whole community, with its Aryan language, to the extreme south. This accounts for the presence of Sinhala in ri Lanka. The history of the movement of people that brought this language is not doc.u.mented, but it may be reflected through legend in the epic Ramayana, which climaxes in a military expedition to this island.* About two hundred years later, in the late third century BC, the links between ri Lanka and the Aryan north were reinforced when Asoka sent his son Mahinda to the island as a Buddhist missionary, so founding the Theravada school of Buddhism which has endured to this day.

Sanskrit in South-East Asia.

The move to ri Lanka may be seen as the beginning of Sanskrit's spread beyond the sh.o.r.es of India. This seaborne expansion makes its significance far greater to the global story, for Sanskrit is the first example in history of a language travelling over a maritime network, through the establishment of trade and cultural links with peoples on the other side. In this, it can be seen as a precursor of the spread of the western European languages in the last five hundred years.

By the middle of the first millennium AD, Sanskrit was established as the hallmark of Indianised civilisation, all over South-East Asia, including the main islands of modern Malaysia and Indonesia. There is no clear record of how this came about. But one feature of the spread of Sanskrit is clear: it was not a military expansion. There was never a warlike move by Indians into Asia, even of the typical short-term Indian empires, which even in north India never seemed to last more than a very few generations.

But if we leave aside military ambition, the motives that have been suggested for the Indian successes exhaust every other possibility: refuge from imperial wars from the Mauryas and Asoka onward, piratical raids, a spirit of adventure, the peaceful pursuit of trade, or a desire to spread sacred learning, of Buddhism certainly, and perhaps earlier even of Hinduism.*

Each of these has something to recommend it, and they are not mutually exclusive. It must mean something, for example, that the name for India current among Malays and Cambodians was 'Kling', that is Kalinga, the coastal realm in eastern India bloodily conquered by Asoka. There, and especially in its northern region Tamralipta ('copper-smeared', modern Tamluk in West Bengal), there was a tradition of producing sarthavaha or sadhava, 'merchants', who were easily confused with sahasika, 'pirates, buccaneers', proverbial in Sanskrit for their bravery, as well as violence. In the treasury of practical wisdom from the sixth century AD, Pancatantra, it is remarked: bhayam atulam gurulokat tam iva tulayanti sadhu sahasika Merchant-buccaneers reckon light as straw the fear instilled by the weighty.27 The popular Jataka tales of previous lives of the Buddha, composed around this time, are also full of merchants who seek wealth in Suvaabhumi.

* In the romanised script for Sanskrit, c is p.r.o.nounced as ch in church, j as in judge. A dot under t, d or n means that it must be sounded with tongue turned back, retroflex. A dot under an h means that it is followed by an echo of the previous vowel (e.g. ka, 'who', as kaha). A dot under an r or an I means that it is p.r.o.nounced as a separate syllable, as bitter, little in American English. A dot under an m means that is p.r.o.nounced simply by nasalising the preceding vowel: aha, 'I', is like American 'uhuh?'. All the stop consonants (k, g, c, j, t, d, , , p, b) can be aspirated, and this is shown by a following h. There are three sibilants, s, and s: the first two are close to English sh, the former as in sheet, the latter with the darker sound as in push.

The motive for the trade is also hinted at by the Sanskrit names that the Indians gave to parts of this eastern world. ri Lanka was known as Tamradvipa, 'copper island', or Tamrapai, 'copper-leafed'; the land beyond the eastern ocean as Suvaadvipa, Suvaabhumi, 'the isle, or the land, of gold'. These names survived to be taken up, or translated, by Greek explorers, Taprobane for ri Lanka, and Khryse Khersonesos, 'Golden Peninsula', for South-East Asia. There is little in these countries' known geology to suggest that the names were well founded. But the quest for precious metals was clearly part of the legend of such ancient navigation. One of the most evocative tales in the Sanskrit equivalent of the 1001 Nights, Somadeva's Kathasaritsagaram ('Ocean of the Streams of Story'), recounts the quest of a Brahman, setting out for his lost loves in Kanakapuri, 'The City of Gold', located somewhere beyond 'The Islands'. One of the merchants he meets on his way has a father who returns rich from a long voyage to a far island, his s.h.i.+p loaded specifically with gold.

More realistically, there was scope for immense profit either in entrepot business, exchanging Indian aromatic resins (including frankincense (kundura) and myrrh (vola)) for Chinese silk, or in obtaining local products such as camphor (karpura) from Sumatra, sandalwood (candana) from Timor or cloves (lavanga) from the Moluccas.28 Indians set out for this Land of Gold from all round the subcontinent. Evidently, the shortest journey was from Gaua (modern Bengal) and Kalinga: we know that Fa-Xian and Yi-Jing took s.h.i.+p from Tamralipti. But the prevailing wind across the Bay of Bengal from June to November is south-westerly, so the most direct sailing was to be had from the southern sh.o.r.es, and this is the area of all the ports noted by the Greeks.29 A handful of inscriptions in Tamil, turning up in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, confirm this route. The ports of the western coast also had their share of departures for the east: an old Gujarati proverb mentions the wealth of sailors back from Java.30 More interesting for us than the motivation of the Indian sadhava is how they would have appeared to the receiving populations, known to the Indians as dvipantara, 'islanders'. These people, Burmese in the east, Austro-Asiatic in the south (Mon, Khmer, or Cham), Malay in the islands, already used bronze, irrigated rice, domesticated cattle and buffalo, and had s.h.i.+ps and boats of their own. They would not have been able to read or write. The Indians would have presented themselves to the local chiefs as visiting dignitaries, probably claiming royal connections back across the ocean, and offering gifts, and perhaps medicines and charms. Winning favour with local elites, some went on to take their daughters in marriage, and thus sow the seeds of new dynasties.

What the Indians brought with them was literacy, and an ancient culture with a vast array of rules (the sutras of the Hindu Dharmasastras, or the suttas of the Buddhist Tipiaka) for every occasion. There was the whole mythology of Hinduism, making Agastya, Krishna, Rama and the Pandava brothers into household names, as they have been ever since in South-East Asia. There was the distinctive idea of the complementary roles of king and priest, admittedly at sixes and sevens over which was ultimately the higher, but clearly in a relations.h.i.+p of mutual support. This relations.h.i.+p could underwrite, and make permanent, the legitimacy of rulers. And so the rulers that the Indians met were happy to become their friends, business partners and fathers-in-law. The new generation that sprang from the mixed marriages would have been the first to receive a full Sanskrit education.

One characteristic of Indian civilisation that they brought with them was a tendency to modify and customise the alphabet. Just as there are now at least ten major scripts* derived in India from the Brahmi characters (diffused all over the subcontinent in Asoka's time), there are another nine that developed in South-East Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines, all derived from Indian scripts, many through the Pallava script of the south. The origin of this diversity lies in the variety of writing materials available in different places, but the different styles evidently came to be national icons. In the Cambodian pillars that carry rules for monasteries, Sanskrit in Khmer script on one side is paralleled by Sanskrit in a North Indian script on the other: perhaps there were North Indian devotees as well as Khmers resident here.31 This is just one of many signs that there was heavy cultural traffic in both directions between India and Indo-China during this period. Another example is given by the life of Atisa, a monk born in Bengal in 982, who went on to become one of the founders of Buddhism in Tibet in his sixties. He had spent his student days in ri Vijaya, in Sumatra.

In a way, the culture as the Indians brought it will always be a mystery to us. The splendours of Shwe Dagon in Burma, Borobodur in Java, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, as well as less well-known magnificences in Pagan, Champa, Laos, Bali and Sumatra, built over a millennium from about AD 500, all stemmed from the seminal ideas of the Indians, but at least in terms of architecture there is nothing now quite like them back in India. We can only speculate that styles executed in stone at Borobodur and Angkor Wat may echo the architecture of wooden buildings long vanished from southern India.

Nevertheless, this roll-call of states and civilisations that took their beginnings from India reminds us how vast, how varied and how long lasting this influence was, all the more remarkable because no military force seems to have been applied anywhere to bring in the new, more organised, Indian society. This contrasts sharply with the record of incursions from the other developed civilisation to the north. Ever since the first century AD, China had been putting constant pressure on the Annamite kingdom of northern Vietnam, periodically invading it, and insisting on recognition of China's emperor as its overlord.

The earliest doc.u.mented Indianised kingdom-the doc.u.mentation is Chinese-was set on the lower Mekong, in modern Cambodia and southern Vietnam, probably in the first century AD. It is usually known as Funan, which is a Chinese version of its name. It was really called, in Khmer, Bnam, 'the mountain',* and its king as kurung bnam, a translation of Parvatabhu-pala or ailaraja: bearing this t.i.tle of 'King of the Mountain', he would have established a cult of the G.o.d Siva in a high place, so reconciling his legitimacy as an Indian king with the native spirits of the land.32 Funan's foundation myth, read from a Sanskrit inscription in Champa,33 confirms this. A Brahman named Kauinya (derived from Kuin, one of Siva's t.i.tles) received a javelin from another Brahman, a hero from the Mahabharata named Asvattaman, and threw it to find the right site for the city. He married a local princess named Soma, daughter of the king of the Nagas, the many-headed water cobras wors.h.i.+pped as protectors of Khmer riches.

Thereafter, major Sanskrit-speaking states were set up all over South-East Asia, Sumatra and Java. Their names are themselves in Sanskrit, and show either a sentimental link with other Indian holy places far away, or an attempt to Indianise local names. It is often difficult now to locate them exactly. In Malaya, Lankasuka, controlling one much-used overland route from the Bay of Bengal to the Gulf of Siam, beside Tambralinga (Ligor), Takkola (Takuapa) and Kaaha (Kedah); in Cham, the south of modern Vietnam, Amaravati (Dong-duong), Vijaya (Binh-dinh), Kauhara (Nha-trang), Pauranga (Phanrang); in Java, Taruma (round Jakarta) and Kaaraja in the east; in Sumatra, Malayu (Jambi), ri Vijaya (Palembang); in Burma, Sudhammavati (Thaton), riketra (Prome or Thayekhettaya), Hasavati (Pegu), ri Deva (Si Thep); and in the region of modern Thailand Dvaravati, north of Bangkok.

Names of rulers too are typically Sanskritic. Good examples are the more than thirty Cambodian kings whose names end in -varman, 'bastion', from Jayavarman, who died in AD 514, to rindrajayavarman, 1307-27, and the Maj.a.pahit kings of Indonesia from Rajasa in 1222-7 to Suhita, 1429-47.*

These led to many more Sanskrit place names, since it was customary to name a city after the king that founded it. To give one example among many dozens, rehapura (literally 'best of cities'), capital of Cambodia, was named after its founder, King rehavarman ('best bastion'). It is likely also that ri Vijaya, the dominant kingdom in southern Sumatra, was named after a king named Vijaya, 'Victorious'.

This is just a sample of some of the better known; as could be expected, the history of the relations of all these cities and kings over a thousand years is a vast and labyrinthine subject, and not one to be broached here.

It is easy to overlook what a major change the introduction of Sanskrit must have been for the local peoples. Sanskrit, as a type of language, was fearsomely different from the local languages, now cla.s.sified as Burman, Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Sanskrit is polysyllabic, and highly inflected, with a complicated consonant system that is not averse to long cl.u.s.ters. Word order is free. This language was being taken up by speakers of other languages where words were short, often distinguished by tone, and made up of simple syllables with single consonants at beginning and end. Inflections were simple or absent, but word order was rigid. It was at least as radical a change as it would be to bring j.a.panese in as an elite language where previously everyone had known only English or Dutch. What a wrench it was can be seen in the mangled remains of some of the Sanskrit names: riketra came out as Thayekhettaya, ri Deva as Si Thep.

Nevertheless, the quality of written Sanskrit that the natives acquired in this part of the world deviated hardly at all from that of India. We do not see strong 'substrate influence' in the texts written here. Talking of Cambodia, R. C. Majumdar remarks that its inscriptions, known from AD 475 to 1327, are generally 'composed in beautiful and almost flawless kavya-i.e. poetic-style, and some of them run to great lengths... Almost all the Sanskrit metres have been successfully used in these verses, and they exhibit a thorough acquaintance with the most developed rules and conventions of Sanskrit rhetoric and prosody.'34 The inscriptions are also full of learned, even witty, allusions to the Vedas and all the different branches of Indian learning, especially grammar.

Particularly accomplished was Queen Indradevi, consort of Jayavarman VII (who ruled in Cambodia 1181-c.1218): she was a pious Buddhist and taught the Buddhist nuns of three convents. She has left an inscription, in praise of her younger sister, another scholar, who had sadly died young: it runs to 102 verses in several different metres.35 Some of the literature written in Indo-China joined the canon of Sanskrit cla.s.sics. Vararuci's Sarasamuccaya ('collection of essences') could be hard hitting: to show how views can differ, he evokes a woman's breast-seen by her child, and by her husband; and then her dead body, seen first by an ascetic, then by her lover, and then by a dog. Later on, he prefigures Pascal's wager in his advice to the atheist (nastika-literally the 'isn't-ist'): if there is no world after death, there is nothing to fear either way; but if there is, it will be the atheists who stand to suffer.36 Sanskrit texts apparently played an important role in the foundation of new Hindu cults, which might be founded to b.u.t.tress newly independent states: so when Jayavarman freed Cambodia from Javanese control in the twelfth century, he invited a Brahman named Hirayadama ('Golden Cord') to perform Tantric rites to guarantee this freedom, under its own ruler. The resulting cult of Devaraja ('G.o.d-king') lasted for 250 years, explicitly based on four named sastra texts. It could not have been done without Sanskrit, and the access to ancient wisdom that it implied.

The sense of numinous power infusing Sanskrit led on occasions to a sort of spiritual nostalgia. One king of Champa, Gangaraja, is said to have abdicated his throne so as to have the chance to give up the ghost on the banks of the Ganges. And, more public-spiritedly, there is evidence from an inscription put up at Vat Luong Kau in Laos that a king called ri Devanika planned to set up a new Kuruketra at home as a subst.i.tute for the sheer holiness of the real Kuruketra north of Delhi. As the site of the Mahabharata's great battle, it was peerless among shrines, but sadly inaccessible. He quotes the epic: Pthivya Naimiam puyam antarike tu Pukaram Trayanam api lokanam Kuruketram visiyate.

On the earth the blessed Naimisha, in the ether Pushkara, But in the three worlds, Kurukshetra holds the crown.37 The long years of Indian influence came to an end only after a full millennium. A major jolt had already come in the thirteenth century, when the Mongols sacked Pagan and other Burmese kingdoms in the north. But it has been suggested by one of the leading scholars, not without nostalgia, that Indian civilisation was the victim of its own increasing popularity: 'The underlying causes of this decline were the adoption of Indian civilization by an increasingly large number of natives who incorporated into it more and more of their original customs, and the gradual disappearance of a refined aristocracy, the guardian of Sanskrit culture.'38 In any event, in the fifteenth century Vietnam expanded its influence into Champa, annexing permanently the south of Indo-China; and about the same time groups of mountain peoples, the Shan in Burma, and the Thai in Siam, established new kingdoms that thrust aside the old powers of Pagan and Angkor. Nonetheless, when founding their new capital, the Thai could not help calling it Ayutthaya, in direct tribute to the Hindu hero Rama's residence, Ayodhya.

Sanskrit carried by Buddhism: Central and eastern Asia.

So far we have largely spoken of Sanskrit as a vehicle of Hinduism. And it seems that for the most part this is what it conveyed at first in South-East Asia. Fa-Xian, returning to China via Ye-po-ti (Yava-dvipa) in the East Indies in the early fifth century AD, remarked: 'in this country heretics and Brahmans flourish, but the law of Buddha is not much known'.39 To this day, Hinduism survives on the island of Bali, east of Java. However, elsewhere in South-East Asia the picture is now very different, Hinduism long ago replaced by Buddhism. This is the result of a long and complex, though not especially b.l.o.o.d.y, history of doctrinal contests between the two faiths. Hindu cults' close a.s.sociations with ruling dynasties ultimately worked against them, when those dynasties fell. But there was also compet.i.tion among strains of Buddhism, Tantra, originally 'the loom' or 'the framework', Mahayana, 'the great vehicle' and Theravada, 'the docrine of the elders'. Theravada, b.u.t.tressed by links with the Sinhala in ri Lanka, ultimately triumphed in South-East Asia. Nevertheless, all these struggles took place against an unchallenged background of Indian learning.

Buddhist missionaries actually came very soon after the first Indian buccaneers and traders, if not along with them. Ceylonese chronicles tell of Asoka sending two monks, Soa and Uttara, to Suvaabhumi in the third century BC,40 although the first archaeological records of Buddhist activity in South-East Asia (in the areas of modern Burma and Thailand) are from the fifth century AD. Hinduism was always a religion likely to appeal to kings and a ruling elite, but not voluntarily to the lower orders, the udras and outcastes, who are singularly downtrodden in the Hindu caste system; by contrast, Buddhism, with its egalitarian emphasis on personal quest for enlightenment, could in principle appeal much more widely. It seems likely that in the early days of Indian advance into the region both religions were represented; their complementary charms may even have served to back each other up, while promoting Indian culture among outsiders.

The religious distinction always had some linguistic implications, the Hindus favouring cla.s.sical Sanskrit, while the Buddhists preferred the closely related but somewhat simpler Pali. As time wore on, there was also a tendency for Pali to be reclothed in archaic Sanskrit forms, giving rise to the particular style of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. Real learning, and creativity, in cla.s.sical Sanskrit tended to be at its best in the Hindu areas, such as Champa, Cambodia, Java and Bali.

Despite the Buddha's original urgings to his disciples to leave behind strict linguistic codes and work in any vernacular (sakaya niruttiya) in order to get the message across, the Buddhist scriptures remained in Pali in South-East Asia, where-in contrast with China and Tibet-there was no major effort to translate them into local languages. Pali became an esoteric liturgical language, unknown to the general population, but apparently without adverse effects on the spread of Buddhism.

Nor was there any converse tendency to have Pali, or some form of Sanskrit, taken up as a language of general communication outside Buddhist liturgy and debate. There is no secular literature in Pali, even if the Jataka tales, which nominally recount the past lives of the Buddha, are rather like such other story books as Aesop's Fables, or its Indian equivalent, the Pancatantra. And in South-East Asia, where Pali survives as a liturgical language, the local vernacular has nothing to do with it: Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Acehnese, Malay and Javanese are all unrelated to Pali, heavy as they are with loans from the Indian languages.

Buddhism has proved a faith of remarkable attractiveness from India outward to the north and east, and so Pali and Sanskrit are extremely well known in these vast areas. But they have remained no more than liturgical languages. As a result, Buddhism's linguistic effects have been far weaker than those of Christianity or Islam. After all, Latin, the language of Western Christianity, provided the foundation for the growth of a common language in the monasteries and then the universities of Europe in this same period (AD 500-1500). Islam propagated Arabic all round North Africa, Arabia, Palestine and Mesopotamia, persisting up to the present day, both in unchanged form as an international lingua franca for the educated and, with local variations, as the basis of many vernaculars. There is no comparable linguistic union of Buddhists, in their daily languages.

As for how the language was used in this part of Sanskrit's story, there is little to say. In Hinduism, the virtue implicit in the very sound of the Vedas had long since been separated from any need to understand their meaning. Now once again for the Buddhists, with the language no longer widely understood, but still widely heard in chants and ceremonial, its substance and sound began to be given a mystic value of their own. Sanskrit became for many a language of mantra, 'incantation' and maala, 'circle, sacred diagram'. In medieval j.a.pan, repeating namu amida butsu, a version of nama Amitabha Buddha, 'Bowing to you, O Resplendent Enlightened One', was the infallible means of reaching the Pure Land after death. And to this day millions of Tibetans chant om mai padme hum, 'Hail the jewel in the lotus', a mystical phrase from Tantric Buddhism, its original s.e.xual imagery now quite forgotten.

More pragmatically, the technology and systems a.s.sociated with writing and a.n.a.lysing Sanskrit provided the basis for literacy in other languages. In this way, sacred languages, unavailable for direct communication among people, could still go on inspiring developments in the local vernaculars.

The advent of Sanskrit, known as fanwen, 'Brahman writing', in China, bongo, 'Brahman talk', in j.a.pan, had only a small effect on the character-based system of writing in use in East Asia, since this had already been well established in China for over a millennium: rather, Chinese characters are often used (though only phonetically) to represent Sanskrit itself in the Buddhist practice of these countries.

One effect it did have was on Chinese phonetics. Chinese scholars of the Tang period (seventh to eighth centuries), knowing the Sanskrit alphabetic tradition could identify the initial consonants of characters, called them zimu, 'word mothers', apparently after the Sanskrit term matka, 'maternal', which is also a letter of the alphabet. These were used to systematise the traditional practice for indicating p.r.o.nunciation in dictionaries: Chinese dictionaries have always done this by what is called fanqie, linking a character with two others, one with the same initial consonant, and the other with the same tone and rhyme. Putting this into a systematic chart was a very modest step in linguistic understanding, since no further a.n.a.lysis of the rhyme part (for example, into vowels and consonants) was undertaken.41 There is also an interesting curiosity in one of the other writing systems used in this vast area of Asia.* j.a.pan owes the order of symbols in its syllabary, the so-called kana, or go-ju-on, 'fifty sounds', to the order of letters in Indian alphabets. The order of Sanskrit letters is conventionally This is not an arbitrary order like our ABCD... Rather it appeals to various purely phonetic properties of the sounds represented. So, for example, all the consonants are placed in an order where tongue contact gradually advances from the back to the front of the mouth cavity. And the nasal consonants (m, n, etc.) always come immediately after the other consonants formed at the same place of articulation. The strange order of the vowels is partly conditioned by the fact that most instances of e and o in Sanskrit actually derive from the diphthongs ai and au, and so are well cla.s.sified next to their long equivalents ai and au.

Now the j.a.panese kana represent syllables, rather than individual consonants. Their p.r.o.nunciation has definitely changed over the last millennium, but using the most ancient p.r.o.nunciation reconstructible, we can state the conventional order as: Immediately we note that the arbitrary order of the vowels (a i u e o) is precisely as in Sanskrit, although this has no motivation in j.a.panese grammar. Furthermore, although there are many fewer consonants in j.a.panese than in Sanskrit, they occur in almost exactly the same order as in the Sanskrit alphabet. In fact, there is only one apparent exception, s, which occurs where c or should be, not at the end like the Sanskrit sibilants. In fact there is reason to believe that the p.r.o.nunciation of this phoneme was actually [s] (English 'sh') or [ts], when the conventional order was set up, which means it would be closest to Sanskrit c (English 'ch', [ts]).

This thoroughgoing intellectual borrowing at the root of the writing system demonstrates that not just the sound of the Buddhist chants but also elements of the traditional a.n.a.lysis of the language had spread to j.a.pan with Sanskrit.

Another example of Sanskrit intellectual influence on the technology of writing is the Tibetan script, which we first see in use in the eighth century AD, derived directly from the Siddha script. The earliest-known use of it is on a stone pillar at ol near Lhasa, dated to 764.42 It is not quite clear if Tibet owes its literacy to Buddhism, or to attempts to modernise administration. The era of the first surviving inscriptions is precisely the time when Buddhism first came to Tibet, with the monk antarakita. But there is no mention of Buddhism on the ol pillar inscription, which is a record of a royal minister's achievements.43 Whatever the motivation, it is clear that the Tibetan alphabet was inspired by an Indian model, and one that was used for the writing of Sanskrit or Prakrit. And Tibetan writing, once established, was very largely taken up with the translation of Buddhist cla.s.sics from Sanskrit or Pali. This became such an industry that there was a Tibetan royal commission in the early ninth century to establish precise rules for equivalences (comparable to the 'controlled language' used in some industrial translation today). The result was a lowering of the literary skill displayed in translation, but such punctilious work was done that it is often possible to reconstruct lost Sanskrit originals simply on the basis of their Tibetan versions.

These religious foundations of Tibet's Sanskrit culture were surmounted by a superstructure of wider-ranging cla.s.sical literature in the thirteenth century, for then Muslim invaders devastated all the centres of higher learning in northern India, and many scholars fled northward into Tibet with their books. Nine Sanskrit pundits accompanied the Khatshe pantshen akyasribhadra to Tibet in 1206, and fifty years later there was collaboration on Sanskrit drama, poetry and poetics between the Indian pundit Lakmikara and the Tibetan scholar so-ston Rdo-rde rgyal msthan.44 It is somehow rea.s.suring to think that eight hundred years ago Tibet was a refuge for Buddhists fleeing from marauding infidels in northern India-the precise opposite of what we have known in the latter part of the twentieth century.